Session #6: 20 July, 19:30 – 22:00 CEST (online)
With: Liam Young
In this session we will explore techniques to immerse our storytelling within land and cityscapes, and how these environments reflect our own complexities as a society.
Liam Young will give a talk on how our perception of the world is largely shaped through the mediums of fiction. Through film we have always imagined alternative worlds as a way of understanding our own world in new ways. A critical role of Science Fiction is to provide a counter balance to the prevailing media narratives around emerging urban technologies. Typically our imagined futures are based on a solutionist view of technology and are marketed to us as simplified worlds of better and brighter often ignoring the complexities, subcultures and unintended consequences that result when technologies are democratized and rolled out at scale. In this talk Liam Young will narrate a series of stories from these worlds less traveled, just small glimpses, fragments, vignettes and snapshots from a series of his films that will come together to create a portrait of an alternative future of technology, urbanisation and automation.
Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. As a concept designer he visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for film and TV and for his own film productions he is a BAFTA nominated producer and has premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, SxSW, the New York Metropolitan Museum, Tribeca Film Festival, the BBC and the Guardian. His work has been collected internationally by museums such as MOMA, the Met, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria and M Plus Hong Kong and has been acclaimed in both mainstream and design media including features with Wired, New Scientist, Arte, Canal+, Time magazine and many more. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth. His fictional work is informed by his academic research and has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angles.